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Comment by treeblah | Hacker News Reader

For me its been the questionable stewardship of vscode (https://github.com/omnisharp/omnisharp-vscode/issues/5276) driving me away from vscode and the Emacs from Scratch videos from the System Crafters youtube channel driving me towards Emacs. When I was looking for alternatives I stumbled on those videos and they blew me away.

Also Emacs 28/29 has been way more welcoming and easy to get started with than when I first tried 8 or so years ago.

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How people expect anything else from a huge corporation is mind-boggling to me. They open source something and people think they are being alturistic. Just like android. You start with open source, then move more and more things behind the corpwall.

Emacs is free and is free for life.

Also Davids channel is most excellent. There's a discord channel where people are very friendly and helpful as well.

I don't necessarily think that anyone was expecting anything else, it's just that VS Code is a great free tool, so even if you know it's probably going to go downhill over time it's hard to deny its effectiveness currently.

I mean it's free, it comes with it's own compilers and toolchains, it's a lot easier to pick up than vim or emacs or even IntelliJ (that's just got a much more dense UI), so it's become the standard IDE for students. Then, once you've gotten your degree or your training or whatever, you'll probably want to stick with the tool you know.

It's kind of funny seeing how every few years we'll have a new hot editor, and all the people who convert to those editors will wonder why anyone would still use Emacs or Vim, only to find out a few years later why people continue to use these 30+ year old editors.

In the meanwhile, both Vim and Emacs will incorporate the functionality that originally made the new editors popular, so the long time Emacs and Vim users lose almost nothing, did not have to go out of their way to use a new editor, and continued to benefit from the existing advantages of these editors.

People like David from System Crafters and Prot are definitely doing a lot to bringing Emacs backs to the masses. They are a visible manifestation of the technical (and media) quality of part of the community. I do not think they get enough credit.

I started using doom emacs cause of distrotube. Switched to vanilla emacs with the help of David

As a vscode user considering the move, how difficult would it be to get to the point of making emacs a daily driver?

Can it be a pick it up as you go thing? Or would I have to spend a few evenings figuring out the basics and configuration? Is lisp knowledge required?

Depends on what you're gonna be doing with it. If you're mainly working with HTML, CSS, maybe some Bash scripts, you can just open it up, work your way through the (IMO excellent) tutorial and you're off to the races.

That said, if Emacs gets its claws in you you may, like me, lose a fair few evenings and weekends just playing around with various packages and customization options because it's just so fun to tweak.

I'd say give using it for weekend projects or a day or 1/2 day a week at work a try.

>>As a vscode user considering the move, how difficult would it be to get to the point of making emacs a daily driver?

Among the big list of features missing in Emacs as of now is remote development that way its done is vscode.

If you install Doom Emacs [1] after installing Emacs itself, I think it would be a couple of days. At least if you can live with the things Doom comes with. It's just a matter of following the instructions, uncommenting the relevant modules in .doom.d/init.el, syncing the changes and off you go.

[1] https://github.com/doomemacs/doomemacs#install

System Crafters youtube channel driving me towards Emacs

I really don't get how watching a PM-type struggle with emacs for two hours at a spell is compelling or instructive. I can struggle with emacs all by myself.

> I really don't get how watching a PM-type struggle with emacs for two hours at a spell is compelling or instructive. I can struggle with emacs all by myself.

Because it's a lot scarier to struggle alone. Plus as his videos progress and his knowledge progresses he frequently teaches you things that come up and practice a lot as a matter of course.

It's kind of like when you start programming you have to build up your endurance for feeling like you're always in a dark room feeling around... and you convince yourself that it won't be like this one day.

A decade or two later you realize you've become accustomed the darkness...

you convince yourself it won't be like this one day

In case you're considering a career in software, no, the feeling of groping around in the dark never disappears.

But it's a feature, not a bug :) and occasionally one gets to imagine multi-dimensional diamonds and then build them.

This helps my imposter syndrome no end

> A decade or two later you realize you've become accustomed the darkness...

Nice one.

> you convince yourself that it won't be like this one day.

http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/i-think-so

Also:

http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/whew-now-im-done

http://www.threepanelsoul.com/comic/on-infinite-loops

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